


Maybe This Time

by gin_eater



Series: Deep Sea Divers [6]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Fluff and Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 06:56:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4128948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gin_eater/pseuds/gin_eater
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alternate ending to Poor Unfortunate Soul. What if Cruella hadn’t woken up in time to escape the cabin?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maybe This Time

“What about _her?_ ” the Savior’s voice pulled Ursula back from her father’s tearful embrace, and her smile faded at the sight of Cruella’s unconscious form on the floor. The protective instinct she’d felt upon witnessing Snow White’s assault on her lover as she’d approached the cabin flickered back to life, augmented by guilt at having become so swept up in the evening’s revelations as to have momentarily forgotten about her completely.

“… I’ll take her,” she said.

The group of heroes – and one hypocritical prick of a pirate – looked immediately like they wanted to protest, on what grounds Ursula wasn’t sure. Probably a knee-jerk reflex to the possibility of the bad guy getting away.

“What would _you_ do with her, throw her in jail?” she asked.

“Or out of town,” suggested Swan.

“Why? So Rumpel can just toss her the scroll and let her back in?”

The blonde looked suddenly chagrined, as if she knew she had been forgetting something.

“Look, I’ll tell you everything I know,” Ursula continued. “Then if I take her, that’s just one less villain you have to worry about. Besides, as evil as you make us out to be, we haven’t actually done all that much since we got here.”

“You tortured August!”

Ursula shrugged. “Not severely. If you wanna to get technical about it, mostly we just threatened him with torture.”

August goggled at her in disbelief. “You kept me tied to a chair for eighteen hours! Gold turned me back into wood and held my face to a fire!”

“Yes, and in a show of enviably heroic fortitude, you folded like a house of cards and talked before you even got singed! I’m sorry your _ass_ fell asleep, but it wasn’t exactly the Spanish Inquisition.”

“When he talked doesn’t matter,” interrupted Snow. “Torture is torture, there is no sliding scale!”

“Are you sure you of all people want to be drawing that line, angelfish?” Ursula asked her.

Snow said nothing.

“I thought not. God, the way you people cherry-pick ... Do you see this?” She held out the shell. “I did nothing to deserve this being taken away from me. And I did _nothing,_ ” she emphasized with a trace of ironic laughter, “to warrant it being returned. Both were the result of a series of good and bad choices made by imperfect people – _some_ more imperfect than others.” She glared at Hook. “But that’s what this life is – with or without magic. No one’s ever in control of what happens in their lives, not completely. There’s always gonna be someone plucking at the strings. An Author. A parent.”

She looked for an extra two beats at Snow White and Charming, who both blinked before she did.

“But they don’t have the power to decide our endings anymore than we do. You just navigate your life as best you can, and hope like hell that whatever swims by when you eventually run aground – and you _will_ run aground – will be something or someone that’s going to help save you. You hero types can understand that concept, can’t you? Hope?”

“We’re waiting,” said Swan, voice hard but not defiant.

Ursula made good on her offer, and their reactions ran the usual heroic gamut from fearful to determined. She wondered if it would be enough, if the choices they would make with this new knowledge would be wise enough to avoid Rumpelstiltskin’s version of an inevitable conclusion.

She wondered, but she didn’t care enough to read along. Maybe she’d look up a review one day. Hear a synopsis through the grapevine.

“Now if you’ll all excuse me,” she muttered, gathering up the unconscious woman on the floor with one of her tentacles, “I am taking my goddamn girlfriend and we are leaving this ridiculous little spit of a town with the _hope_ of never laying eyes on any of you again.”

She plucked Cruella’s fur from its place draped over the back of the sofa and turned toward the door, intent on a dignified exit, only to be confronted with the utterly bemused face of her father. Damn it, she’d forgotten about _him_ this time. Multitasking was so much easier when it was her tentacles doing all the work.

“Girlfriend?” he asked.

Ursula sighed heavily, rolled her eyes and pushed past him.

Poseidon trailed hesitatingly after her.

“You mean … _girlfriend?_ ”

“Yes, Father. Girlfriend.”

“But … sweetheart, can we talk about this?”

“No.”

“Was it the trident? It was the trident, wasn’t it?”

“Father, _please_ …”

 

* * *

 

 

Cruella awoke to what felt like a skull full of sledgehammers and a resulting automatic (but always tragically short-lived) damnation of gin.

Groaning, she lifted a hand to feel gingerly at back of her head where the pain seemed to be emanating from, and her brow creased in confusion at the discovery of what felt like a fairly sizable egg there. Gin had never done _that_ before.

Further awareness trickled down, in the awareness that something nearby was actually trickling – an echoey sound like that of a leaky tub in a spacious bathroom. God, she hadn’t passed out and hit her head on the toilet or something, had she? Because that had been a humiliating low she’d hoped never to revisit ...

But whatever was beneath her was soft in both surface and give, and her arms were bare, ruling out both tiled floor and fur coat, and not since her last holiday in Nice had a bathroom smelled so strongly of the sea.

She tried her eyes. The wall she faced was a beautiful cerulean in color, and … moving? No, she realized as her vision cleared – _rippling._ Rippling with light, as off the surface of a swimming pool. It was quite a big wall, too; quite a big room, high-ceilinged and palatial in a way that was most refreshing following the past few nights spent in Rumpelstiltskin’s grubby little cabin-–

Rumpel’s cabin.

Cruella lurched into a sitting position, wincing when the throbbing in her head ratcheted up in intensity, but forcing it aside. The softness beneath her wobbled mildly with her movements – a waterbed, she realized, and her coat reassuringly tucked beside her like a cuddly toy.

Cruella, however, was far from reassured. She was meant to be in Rumpel’s cabin, guarding August. She _had_ been, and then that doughy-faced Savior had arrived and … and then nothing. Darkness and instruments of menial labor banging against her brain.

“Oh, good, you’re awake. You were starting to worry me.”

Cruella’s head whipped around to the front of the room, chased by a wave of dizziness that had her seeing double.

“Ursula?” She squinted, trying to force the other woman into focus. “Where am I? What the devil is going on?”

The sea witch closed the tall, elaborately carved golden doors behind her with one tentacle. In another, she carried a silver goblet, much weathered and thematically engraved with various types of crustaceans.

“How’s your head?” she asked, irksomely ignoring Cruella’s questions.

“Assuredly _not_ in the mood for games,” Cruella groused as Ursula sat down beside her on the edge of the bed. “Where the hell are we?”

Ursula looked at her steadily. “My home,” she said. “Atlantica.”

Cruella’s eyes widened and her jaw unhinged.

“Here,” said Ursula, pressing the goblet into Cruella’s hands, “drink this. It’ll help with the pain.”

Cruella took it numbly, but didn’t lift it to her lips. “What do you mean, Atlantica? In-the-middle-of-the-bloody-ocean-Atlantica? Where your-–” The word “father” died on her lips. She frowned and cocked her head. “Is he … dead?”

Ursula laughed softly. “I think I nearly gave him a heart attack, but no, he’s still alive. And Atlantica’s actually not far off the coast of Glowerhaven.” She nodded at the cup. “Drink.”

Cruella took a perfunctory mouthful, and her eyes widened in alarm. A swallow reflex tempered by decades of tossing back shots was the only thing that enabled her to force it down before she gagged, grimacing and shuddering so hard she nearly pulled a muscle in her neck.

“Good heavens, that’s wretched!” she coughed out. “What is it, bilge water?”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t drink it.”

“I already don’t want to drink it. Is all the food here this ghastly?”

“Hey, just be grateful I made it into a tea instead of making you chew it like all the rest of us had to do growing up. Not a lot of cooking happens underwater.”

Cruella wasn’t sure which was more disquieting – the abysmal possibilities of the Atlantican diet, or the fact that Ursula’s mouth was still turned up at the corners. Smiles from the sea witch tended to be rare and precious as wild pearls (and in Cruella’s not-so-humble opinion, far more radiant and worth the trouble to obtain).

“You’re happy,” she stated, and something dashed across her mind, which was clearing now, with grudging thanks to the loathsome drink. “Darling, enough with the suspense: what on _earth_ is going on? Are the others here, too?”

Ursula sat back a little, expression sobering.

“No,” she said. “Just us. Charming’s pasty princess got you from behind with a castiron skillet.”

“Oh, that craven little bitch,” Cruella seethed. “The next time I see her …”

“You won’t,” said Ursula. “See her again, I mean. Or any of the others. Not for a while, at least.”

Suspicion prickled to life at the nape of Cruella’s neck, and she held Ursula’s eyes with a mounting sense of unease.

“Why not?” she demanded.

“Because I told them everything. The heroes.”

Cruella gaped at her, wondering if the drink had shot her past pain relief and headlong into narcotic hallucination. “You what? But … but the plan – Swan – the _Author,_ we-–”

“We don’t need him,” said Ursula, shaking her head.

“Don’t need him? Darling, I resent the very notion of the bastard myself, and I realize we’ve had a few small victories since the Dark One came calling, but isn’t it a little early in the game to write him off completely?”

“It isn’t,” Ursula maintained. “I got it back, Cruella. My singing voice.” She smiled despite herself, still giddy with amazement at being able to say so. “I got it back.”

Deeply perplexed, Cruella struggled to digest this anticlimactic turn of events.

“You’re having me on.”

Ursula shook her head. “Hook still had it, hidden on his ship. He offered me a trade: my voice for whatever I could tell him about Rumpel’s plan.”

An axe fell in the ensuant silence, ringing in Cruella’s ears like the slide of a knife on a whetstone.

No. God, no.

“So you … so you just, what, weighed your options and decided you’d rather be able to sing in the shower again than-–” Cruella bit her tongue, and an achy heat began to swarm behind her eyes. Damn it, she would _not_ cry. She wouldn’t say it out loud and she _would not_ cry.

Why had she ever let Rumpel tempt her? Why had she dared to hope? They’d spent the past god only knew how long choosing themselves over each other, when push came to shove: briefly coming together and then scrambling away, fearful of weakness, always thinking _later, later,_ when enemies both tangible and abstract had been annihilated once and for all, when they’d finally crushed their shortcomings beneath their feet and achieved … what?

How stupid she’d been to think that they might have finally found a foothold, pathetic as Liza bloody Minelli singing maybe-this-times to an empty Weimar cabaret. “Don’t count on it, darling,” Cruella had said to the television set, throwing back a negroni and then throwing the glass at the screen.

She wanted to throw the goblet in Ursula’s face right now. How could she? How could she have relinquished what might have been their last chance at not only being together, but staying that way?

Ursula shook her head. “That is _not_ fair. You should know more than anyone what this means to me.”

“Oh, I do, darling,” Cruella laughed bitterly. “It means you jumped at the chance to throw us all under the bus if it meant you could safely cross the road. You _coward,_ ” she spat. “I knew octopuses were spineless but in that bipedal get-up I thought you could at least _mimic_ having a backbone.”

Ursula stared at her, and had Cruella been anyone else she would have been reduced to a shaking, sniveling mess of fear and apology beneath the crushing gloom that gathered in the sea witch’s gaze, like storm clouds swirling over black water.

But Cruella wasn’t anyone else, and to her Ursula was more than the sea witch, more than Poseidon’s daughter: she was the woman who nodded off with her head in Cruella’s lap every time a movie was getting to the good part. She was the woman who’d looked on amusedly in the bathroom mirror when Cruella taught herself the ins and outs of cosmetics when they no longer had glamours to fall back on. She was the woman who curled up tight as an anemone in her sleep, hooked close around Cruella’s ungainly sprawl as if holding on for dear life to the mast of a sinking ship, one knee in Cruella’s ribs and the other leg draped over her hips. There was no fearing Ursula at her worst when Cruella had seen her at her lowest, and found both equally desirable.

“I _know_ you’re not stupid enough to mean that,” Ursula told her, more incredulous than threatening.

“Suffering from a head injury, darling,” Cruella reminded her. “I’m stupid enough to mean a lot of things right now.”

“Oh, come on!” Ursula exclaimed, standing and throwing her arms up in disgust. “I pulled Maleficent out of the jaws of certain bat-winged death when I barely even knew her! The both of us went back to the town line for fucking Rumpel when he’d already revealed enough of his plan that we probably could have made just as much progress toward finding the Author without him! I realize I may have wrung a few necks with my tentacles over the years, but I’m not the type to just leave people hanging!”

“Then why did you?!” Cruella demanded.

“I _didn’t!_ Your bony ass is _here,_ isn’t it?”

Cruella opened her mouth to shout back, but at that, found herself at a loss for words to shout. She looked around the room again, at the floor-to-ceiling windows that rendered it a fish bowl in reverse, made private by diaphanously iridescent curtains that might have been spun from nacre itself.

“Well … _why_ is it here?” she asked, and wished she could have sounded more magisterially compelling than like a floundering cat with tape on its paws. “And what about Mal?”

“Mal’s different. She’s tied up in that world in a way that we aren’t. When you and I escaped Regina’s curse, we were given more outs than we could see at the time. And I took one, and I took you with me, because …“ She sighed and sat back down on the bed, taking one of Cruella’s hands in hers.

Against her better judgment, Cruella let her.

"Because in getting my voice back, I realized something. Happy endings, they’re not endings at all: they’re just the beginnings of better stories. Stories that don’t have to endlessly repeat themselves to get their point across. A happy ending is just … finding a way to move on. Open the next book.”

“You say that like it promises anything. We’ve had plans fall through before. Nearly _every_ plan, if you want to be pathetically accurate about it.”

“You’re right: it doesn’t promise anything. But it doesn’t foreshadow anything, either, not like it did before, because there is no plan this time, there’s just … just whatever we decide to do.”

Cruella swallowed dryly. “Ursula, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying I’m done. The self-serving schemes, the undirected rage, the grudges, biding my time, all of it. I just want to live my life. Happiness isn’t a pair of bookends, Cru, it’s all the books in between them. And I’ve finally been able to open a new one.”

The sledgehammers, Cruella dimly noticed, had returned, but this time it wasn’t her head that they were aiming for.

“You sound like one of _them,_ ” she accused. “Like a _hero._ ” And on her tongue, it sounded like the four-letter word it was.

Ursula chuckled sadly and shook her head. “Baby, I _promise_ you, I am not a hero. I’m just no longer the furthest thing from one.”

Cruella had never been claustrophobic before, but suddenly the generous room seemed to be downsizing. Its broad walls were closing in and soon the windows would begin to crack.

“Why are you doing this to me?” she asked. “Why did you bring me here to tell me this? So you could … so you could _save_ me from myself? So you could impart this great new wisdom of yours and I would see the light and turn over a new leaf and, what, we would live happily ever after, doing good deeds and soberly patting one another on the back for a job well done at the end of each insipidly monotonous day?”

Ursula shrugged. “No, not really. I brought you here because I want you with me. I’m telling you this because it’s about goddamn time one of us said something concrete, and getting my voice back has made me uncharacteristically chatty. Look, they say the course of true love never did run smooth, and if that’s a prerequisite, then I’d say we’ve got one hell of a leg up on the competition. And if you want a pat on the back, I’ve got eight hands, but truth be told I’d rather be using them to fuck you – yes, preferably for the rest of our lives. You can be drunk if you want, but my dexterity suffers, so I probably won’t be at the time.”

Cruella felt something hot and wet race in thin lines down her cheeks.

Those cracked fucking windows were leaking.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head, not having felt this overwhelmed since their earliest days in the Land Without Magic, when they’d been catapulted into mundanity and utterly failed to stick the landing. The possibility of a repeat performance swung pendulously, tauntingly in front of the visions conjured by Ursula’s speech. The dreams it had dusted off that still hurt to see clearly. “I don’t know.”

Ursula squeezed her hand tightly, and looked very near to tears herself.

“Neither do I. But that’s what makes parking on the tracks so damned addictive.”

Cruella laughed helplessly, and Ursula took the cup from her hand and set it on a splashily ornate bedside table. Then she cupped Cruella’s face in her hands, thumbed away tears that replaced themselves just as quickly, and kissed her.

Cruella’s heart became the sledgehammer, which focused its assault on her ribcage.

“Mmf–-” she mumbled against Ursula’s lips, and pulled away abruptly. “But darling, how can I stay here? This room is lovely, but the whole castle can’t be aerated, can it? And anyway, I’d go mad, staying cooped up indoors the whole time.”

The gleam in Ursula’s eye wasn’t unlike the same one she got when she was about to do something particularly wicked, and oftentimes naked. Another tentacle brought forth a bracelet that had up to now escaped Cruella’s notice, which was a testament to her general state of bewilderment, because it was exactly her style: six rows of alternating black and white pearls, connected by a filigreed fold-over clasp.

Ursula removed the diamond-and-platinum cuff that encircled Cruella’s left wrist, and replaced it with the pearls, pausing just before she closed the catch.

“Are you ready?”

Cruella took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “Not for anything that’s happened in the past few hours, but that hasn’t stopped you so far.”

The clasp was clicked shut.

Cruella’s formidable eyebrows climbed towards her hairline in amazement.

“… Oh my giddy aunt.”

It was easily the strangest, most alien sensation she’d felt to date, which, considering her taste in women, was saying something. It was as though her legs, leather trousers and all, momentarily became water, splitting like falls around rocks, with the queerest kinetic impression that they were flowing away from her, something like the disconnected but spatially still there experience of a sleeping limb, only sixfold in its intensity.

“Oh my god,” she breathed. “Oh, it’s _extraordinary_ …” She looked at Ursula, astonished. “Is it always like this? Is this how you feel all the time?”

“Well, I’m accustomed to it, so it’s not quite as … _consuming,_ but … yes.”

Recognition dawned in Cruella’s eyes then, recognition and remorse.

“This is what you meant,” she said. “Back in New York. This is what you lost.”

“Yes,” Ursula solemnly confirmed.

Cruella nodded absently, struggling to process so many things at once. It was like being covered in fingertips. Fingertips with tastebuds. _Twitchy_ fingertips with tastebuds. And they were _beautiful,_ long and slender, pale as tallow candles and spotted with bright rings of blue-black.

“They’re rather fetching, aren’t they?” she appraised, not a little proudly.

“You’ve looked worse,” Ursula allowed, shrugging, grinning when Cruella huffed after a distracted moment and lightly smacked her arm.

Cruella lifted one of her new appendages experimentally, willing it to undulate and curl, marveling at the fluidity that resulted from a lack of joints.

Ursula held up her hand, and Cruella coiled the tentacle carefully around it, gasping softly in surprise at its sensitivity. The tiny hairs on Ursula’s wrist, the whorls of her fingerprints and lines of her palm, the steady echo of her pulse, even the warm, vaguely nutty scent of her skin could be perceived through the flexing, eager little suction cups. It was, simultaneously, a whole other world and simply more of this one. A centripetal magnification she could never have imagined beyond the realm of Wonderland’s more psychotropic exports.

“… Okay,” said Cruella, and hastily began wriggling out of her top. She nodded at Ursula. “Take off your clothes.”

Ursula laughed. “What?”

“You heard me. Strip. We are having sex, _right now._ ”

Her enthusiasm, it seemed, was contagious, because the tentacles she hadn’t wrapped around Ursula’s wrist and hand all sprang into random, excited action like joke snakes from a can.

“ _Or_ you’re not coming near me with those things until you’ve learned how to control them,” Ursula corrected her.

“But!”

“Ain’t happening, stringbean. Now put the new toys away before you take someone’s eye out.”

Cruella’s mouth pursed in a petulant moue. She glanced around as if for a switch or a pull cord. “How?”

“Just will it, the same way you do when you’re influencing an animal. Just make them think they want to be two legs again.”

“Do I have to breathe on them?”

“You shouldn’t.”

Cruella closed her eyes and concentrated. Sure enough, within a handful of seconds the weird, liquid rush of the transformation began anew, only this time seemed to be flowing towards her, inside of her, instead of out and away. Within moments, she was simply Cruella again, with nothing more unmanageable than what could be taken care of by a Visa Black Card or, of course, the goddess currently smiling at her with an affection as open and deep as the realm over which she reigned.

“Extraordinary,” Cruella said again, but not about the tentacles this time. “Darling, I want to hear it. This fabled voice of yours.”

Ursula felt her face heat. She’d never once been shy about singing before, but doing in so in front of Cruella, who not only knew the story but had firsthand, intimate knowledge of how Ursula herself had viewed the quality and capabilities of her mother’s gift, was nerve-wracking in an entirely new way. She knew Cruella to be a harsh critic of many things, which didn’t ordinarily bother her even when that criticism was aimed in her direction – cattiness came part and parcel with the whole villain package, and certainly Ursula had been quite happily guilty of it, herself – but this … their relationship had jumped, often less than nimbly, from precipice to precipice for decades, but this was, as far as Ursula was concerned, the leap that would bind or break them.

She closed her eyes and took a calming breath, then opened them, and met Cruella’s.

“ _What would I give to live where you are? What would I pay to stay here beside you? What would I do to see you smiling at me?_ ”

Red lips parted. Their corners widened and curled.

“ _Where would we walk? Where would we run, if we could stay all day in the sun? Just you and me, and I could be part of your world …_ ”

Ursula was right – Cruella more than anyone knew what the loss of her voice had done to her. How she'd felt like a husk of a person without it, in the same vein as Cruella herself felt like a raw nerve in a winter storm whenever she’d been denied access to the power and symbolism of her beloved coat. But Cruella hadn’t anticipated that Ursula’s voice could ever be a fur unto itself: that it could ever shield her spirit and warm her bones like a blanket of the finest, softest chinchilla. That it could soothe the burns on her soul like cool water and a careful breeze, and hush the infernal hisses in her head that said _need more_ and _still not enough_ and laughed derisively from behind her eyes when she looked in the mirror after too many but still too few drinks.

Maybe, with that voice to fall back on when she felt herself begin to slip …

Oh god, she was a fool, but maybe this time …

They were several seconds into silence before Cruella remembered to breathe.

“It’s exquisite, darling,” she said truthfully, tremulously. “It’s priceless. Honestly.”

Relief and joy bloomed on Ursula’s beautiful face, a divulgence of emotions Cruella had never suspected she could cause in another person without also holding onto the edges of the rug upon which they were standing, and especially not that that she could have mirrored them without the least desire to take those edges and tug on them hard.

She tucked a lock of light hair behind Ursula’s ear and affectionately traced the shell with her fingertip, then pulled the other woman further onto the bed, until they were wrapped similar to how they always ended up, Ursula’s head pillowed on Cruella’s shoulder, their legs and Ursula’s tentacles a tangle, Cruella’s right hand feathering rudderless designs up and down along the sea witch’s back.

She snuggled deeper into the squashy mattress and hummed in contentment. “I can’t _wait_ to go driving with you again. You’ll put even the Panther’s sound system to shame.”

Ursula stiffened against her. She opened her mouth, but found herself voiceless once again.

Cruella bolted upright and twisted to look down at her lover with a horror she hadn’t known since Kimye had made the cover of _American Vogue_.

“ _You left the car behind?!_ ” she screeched.

“I’m sorry!” Ursula’s hands went up automatically to shield herself. “It wasn’t exactly on my list of priorities at the time!”

Cruella shook her head, utterly aghast, utterly betrayed. “You liar! You _liar,_ you don’t love me at all!”

“You couldn’t drive it around here, anyway!”

“That is _hardly_ the point! My car, oh, my beautiful _car_ …”

Ursula pressed a palm to her forehead and groaned. “How about a boat? We’ll find you a nice sloop or a yacht or something. Will that make up for it?”

Cruella sniffled, and considered this. “… I want a dreadnought,” she decided.

“You want a fucking battleship?”

“Dazzlepainted,” she added. “With cannons. And torpedoes. _And_ a harpoon gun.”

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“Well you wanted to know what you would have to pay to stay beside me! Am I marrying up or aren’t I? Surely it’s not too great a request for the ruler of all the ocean to fulfill?”

“You know, technically you’re still married to somebody else, _Mrs. Feinberg._ ”

“Oh, and polygamy is _so_ frowned upon in these parts. I’m sorry, darling, I’m still a bit addled – _how_ many wives has your father had again?”

“Bitch, I will take that bracelet right back to the vault–-”

“The hell you will!” Cruella cradled her wrist protectively, looking scandalized at the very suggestion. “And just for the record, darling, you had better not _ever_ try to use that little bliss-roofie you call a voice to win any arguments, or you will experience a whole new definition of the term ‘muff diving’ that I can promise you will be a great deal less pleasant than the first!”

Ursula gawped at her. “Unbelievable!” she yelled. “Un-fucking-believable! _This_ is the thanks I get for saving your ass, giving you gills, and declaring my eternal fucking devotion? You bitching about a stupid car, demanding a self-contained armada, and insulting my family?”

Cruella tutted and rolled her eyes. “Some family. Like the cast of Big Love with barnacles on. And you didn’t exactly go down on one knee, darling, I mean even Richard managed to push through the arthritis and–- _oof!_ ”

Her back hit the mattress with a whump as Ursula pinned her stationary with limbs and appendages both, and covered her mouth with one hand.

“You know what?” she said, “ _Fuck_ this.”

Above her hand, Cruella’s eyes went from fuming to panic-stricken. Had Ursula taken her seriously? Was it over, again, almost as soon as it had begun?

“I’ve got better things to go down on than knees.”

Of course not, because this was a new story, one that didn’t play by the rules – not that the two of them ever really had, anyway.

Cruella relaxed as Ursula removed her hand and replaced it with her mouth, and she kissed her back with abandon.

Bugger the boat. Bugger even the car.

At least until tomorrow, when the morning opened to a fresh page in their book.

**Author's Note:**

> This had been going to be the end of the series (not that I'd stop writing it, but that everything else would take place before this point), but as it's silly wish fulfillment, it doesn't address any of the issues I had with Ursula's departure beyond the splitting up of Sea Devil, and so there will be at least a couple more stories to come that deal with Cruella's adjusting to undersea life and Ursula's properly untangling her relationship with her father/her struggles with returning to the aquatic world's good graces.


End file.
